5 juillet

I’ve only just watched the WSJ’s interview video for the iPhone’s anniversary. There isn’t much in it that we didn’t know before, but I enjoyed the software keyboard’s story, as told by Scott Forstall:

One year away from launch, they couldn’t figure out the keyboard; Forstall froze development of all system applications for a few weeks so that every engineer could offer their own take on it. One of them (I wish we knew who) came back with the intelligent keyboard we know and its dynamic hit regions.

I feel like iOS and watchOS would have a better UX if Apple did this more often. If you got ten people each trying to reinvent the Notification Center, surely you’d get a better result than the incremental deterioration of the last few years. Or the Watch’s awful Weather app. Or…

9 juillet

I’m not gonna do much in “Blocks by Google” until they add mirror planes, but I love this app already. The classic idea of modeling by extruding faces and moving vertices and god knows what else has always seemed completely unfathomable to me (whereas I’m perfectly at ease with the way Rhino or Fusion 360 works) but moving your head around the model and adjusting its faces and vertices with your hands is so much more natural.

Blocks is somewhat limited at the moment but you can see where it’s going — assuming it’ll follow the same path as Tilt Brush — and it has every chance of becoming quite awesome and quite useful.

I was watching a video about the realism (ha!) of Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ fauna and just realized: you could solve the absurdity of its magical hovering drone-eagle by giving it autonomy — instead of controlling the eagle, you just move the overhead camera freely, and the eagle circles around the view to symbolize the way it’s gathering information (and transmitting it to you via long-range wifi, I don’t know).

I refuse to fly an eagle that has a pause button. But then, I don’t intend to play Origins anyway, so who cares.

That video doesn’t retroactively make me like the game but I appreciate and respect a writer who puts that much depth into their story and characters. It’s ironic that there is so much detail and hidden depth when the lack of subtlety is what turned me off in the game: for me the execution was too forced, too unrealistic, and relied on emotional blackmail (notably with half the vignettes preying on every parents’ fear for their child’s life — no wonder that left me cold). You don’t get points for world-building that needs a one-hour YouTube analysis to be revealed if the first-time experience itself doesn’t feel good.

The exception being, of course, Lewis’ story, which is such a masterpiece of… ludo-narrative harmony, I guess? that I do agree it’s worth the price of admission.